Month: Jun 2018

In these posts I will have a look at the three cards from the Major Arcana connected to the sphere of Venus and examine them together. Those three cards are III – The Empress, V – The Hierophant and XI – Justice (alternatively VIII – Adjustment). Please note that these posts will be rather experimental.

What I want to achieve with this exercise is to show that there are other sides to Venus than what a lot of people realize. A lot of people only think of the Empress card and what is traditionally connected to that card when they think of Venus. That is obviously not wrong, but my opinion is there is a whole lot more to Venus than that.

In the Orphic Hymns there is one hymn dedicated to Justice, which I think describes the relationship between some parts of Venus quite well. The tarot card Justice is linked to Venus through Libra. These are the last few lines of that hymn:

Hear, O goddess.

rightly shatter wicked men,

so that mortals who eat

of the fruits of the earth

and also all living creatures

nursed in the bosom

of Earth, the divine mother,

nursed in the bosom of sea-dwelling Zeus,

may follow a path

both balanced and noble.

First it speaks of the shattering of wicked men. This shattering does not happen for the sake of shattering wickedness alone. It has a very concrete function. It works this way to make way for that all living creatures can enjoy the fruits of the earth in peace. And that brings to me to one important aspect of the Justice card.

Aleister Crowley decided to rename the Justice card for his Thoth deck and in the Book of Thoth he makes some reasonable arguments for it. Justice as such, is a very human concept, and to be fair we humans don’t really do the best job of agreeing exactly what justice is. Therefore he renamed the card to “Adjustment” and argued that “nature isn’t just, but it adjust.” What is meant by that is quite simply that everything has a cause and an effect. Essentially this is a way to understand what karma is. You make a small push on something and it can set a chain of effects in motion. When you pour a bowl of water over a stone, the water adjusts and moves around the stone, because such are the laws of nature. And it is this mechanism of cause and effect that the Justice card really describes. Maybe it is putting a little bit too much into the Justice card to have it as a personified idea. At least, I think so. But it does fit in quite well with the hymn and the other qualities of Venus.

If you picture yourself a kingdom, your own if you like, the traditional role of Venus is associated with the production of all kinds (fertility, fruitfullness etc.) within the kingdom. The role of Justice in this case would be to ensure that any kind of production at all can take place. Mars would be protecting the kingdom towards any external threats, but Justice is also helping keeping the kingdom together internally. Not necessarily through formal laws, but through norms and even natural selection.

In Galatians 6 in the Bible there is a famous quote “Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.”

Also here there the idea of karma (in the sense of cause and effect) is linked to production. And, I really do not think it is random. Although, the Bible does of course not make any such links to Venus explicitly. Christianity made sure to remove any practices related to celebrating earth and fertility, which is one reason that many pagan traditions still lived on, but that is entirely another discussion.

Although Venus has been associated with friendship, love and so on, it also has a more raw and unforgiving side to it. Karma can at times be quite brutal. It isn’t something beautiful, but it is necessary to keep order. Without it, it would be difficult for all living creatures to enjoy the fruits of the earth as described in the hymn. It is also the mechanism behind evolution and the survival of the fittest. Mother Nature isn’t just (at least she doesn’t feel that way to humans), but she adjusts all the time. Also notice how the hymn ends with the words “balanced” and “noble”. Mother Nature always seek balance.

I will stop here for now, and I have yet to talk about the Hierophant which is linked to Venus through Taurus. Let me know your thoughts in the comments where you think this card fits into all of this. I have some ideas, which I will need to refine a little for the next post. It has been a challenging, but nice exercise this far…

-Thus spake the Night Spirit

The Empress, the Hierophant and Adjustment from the Thoth deck.

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It’s been a few days since my last update. My energy hasn’t been the best (illness) and the topics I have in my drafts aren’t the easiest posts to write. So I decided to go with this topic to get started again.

I do not come from a background where I claim everything related to tarot or the occult for that matter to be a product of psychology. But, I will disagree with everyone who claims that their deck of cards has energy. There are multiple reasons for this and number one is what is meant by “energy”? Which energy is it? Who does it belong to? I just don’t find it to be very specific.

The second reason is if the tarot is supposed to be made up of all kinds of different energies in the universe then how can that be one definable energy? There are several inconsistencies here and many of them seem to be fairly popular. Of course not everyone thinks tarot works that way, but there are surprisingly many.

The third is that the tarot is made up of archetypes. None of these are complete or perfect here on the physical plane. So the cards in themselves cannot contain that energy. They are only representations of these ideas.

Those ideas you can argue can be called different types of “energies”, but they aren’t manifested in the cards and will not radiate with their energy. If that was the case you could have been doing tarot readings without even looking at the cards and then flip them over later to see if you got them right.

Having that said I still think it is important to treat the cards with care and respect. They are after all the tools we use to connect to the divine and open our channels for information, but my point here is, the cards are the tools, and you are the channel for the information they bring. It is you that make that special connection to the divine.

Some people are also afraid to let others touch their cards. I am less sure about if that has any effect , because I have not had many touch mine and then done a reading for myself or someone else straight after, but in my experience it has had no effect at all when a longer time has passed. Even if there is something to it, I would at best compare it to when you spray a little bit of perfume into a room with good ventilation.